(By the way: if you want to contest the idea that Loretta Sanchez is a known racist, I suggest that you take it up with former Congressional Republican candidate Van Tran. The race-baiting in that campaign reached the point where Sanchez was openly declaring that the Vietnamese were trying to steal the seat from ‘our community,’ which was almost as ironic as it was racist.)
Let us count the number of factually incorrect things that Rep. Sanchez can say in one minute, thirty five seconds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ7WbyiJ3ak&feature=player_embedded
OK, let’s go:
- No, there are not 89 freshman Republican House Members in the 112th Congress. There are 85.
- No, 80 of them did not defeat incumbent Democrats. 65 did.
- No, there are actually four Constitutional requirements for being a member of the House of Representatives: Sanchez forgot the one where Members must “when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.” See, this is why we had the Constitution read out at the beginning of the 112th Congress; so that there’s no excuse.
- The actual requirement for passing legislation is (ideally) 218 Aye votes, not ‘relationships.’ I normally wouldn’t score this so harshly, but judging from the first three I’m not exactly sure what color the sky is in Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s world, or whether it’s actually describable in human terms. Best to be vigorous.
- Loretta Sanchez does not know how to get along with people. I mean, really: trying to get Gabby Giffords thrown off of a committee? Does Sanchez have any class at all?
- And now we come to the meat of it. While there are at least two freshmen Congressmen who have a name that could be nicknamed “Moe” (Mo Brooks of Alabama and Morgan Griffith of Virginia), neither is the racist stereotype that Sanchez insinuated. Brooks is a Duke-educated lawyer and former special assistant attorney general for two state AGs. Griffith got his law degree from Washington & Lee University and was Virginia’s House Majority Leader until he was elected to Congress*. That’s part one.
- Part two? The chart below breaks down the geographical makeup of the 65 House freshman Republicans who defeated incumbents:
| Mountain | 6 | 9% |
| Mid-West | 18 | 28% |
| North-East | 14 | 22% |
| South | 23 | 35% |
| South-West | 3 | 5% |
| West | 1 | 2% |
As you can see: even by the most generous interpretation of the boundaries, the South (and that was a Deep South accent that Sanchez affected) makes up a plurality of Democratic seats flipped. The real story of the 2010 election was in how the GOP came roaring back in the Mid-West and North-East, both of which had been too-quickly declared as being safe Democratic territory for the next generation.
But if you tell that story, then you can’t (inaccurately) racially stereotype your opponents. And you can’t get laughs out of your equally clueless, and frankly equally racist, interviewers…
Moe Lane (crossposted)
*I would have listed Loretta Sanchez’s accomplishments at this point, but aside from an MBA I can’t particularly find any.
Loretta is one of the biggest embarrassments in a California congressional delegation that includes several (Let’s not forget Barbara Lee, Henry Waxman, and Pete Stark). I’ve been following her career ever since she (probably) stole her seat from Bob Dornan in ’96. Not that I was a great fan of Dornan, but I get annoyed when illegal voters swing elections — and then the House buries it.
Regarding her bigotry, and in addition to her sleazy tactics against Tran, when Arizona passed SB 1070 she started babbling about how proponents of the bill were tools of White supremacists and perhaps even White supremacists themselves: http://tinyurl.com/3ux4lz6
It’s my fond hope that the redistricting commission gives her a much less friendly district in 2012.